Photographs and Memories
by Epigone1
Summary: Hawkeye tries to contact B.J. after the war. [Slash.]


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Rating: PG-13, for the sake of caution. Sexual innuendo, but nothing direct or explicit. References to some not-so-nice things, such as adultery and violence.

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Author's Notes: As is noted below, the title for this story is shamelessly ripped from Jim Croce's lovely song of the same name. Not one of the characters mentioned herein belongs to me, although I would pay a tidy sum for a couple of them. I am not making money off of this (is the disclaimer even really necessary? Can you see anyone _paying_ me to write this schlock?), so leave your lawsuits at home.

The idea for the story also is attributed to Jim Croce; the basic plot came to me while I was listening to "Operator," which is also a gorgeous song. So, no, I haven't ever had an original thought in my life. So sue me. Or don't, since the only reason I'm disclaiming away up here is to prevent such an action from being taken.

Many, many, many thanks go to Iolanthe, Barrie, and Flick for their beta-ing, as well as to all the people on the Mash-Slash board. I would never have gotten up the guts to post this thing without their feedback.

Last word from me: this story is slash. It presupposes a romantic relationship between two people of the male persuasion. I do not presume to set this forth as agreeing with the intentions of the creators of M*A*S*H, so don't tell me that "they weren't meant to be together in the series!" This I know. I still like the pairing. If you don't like the concept, you shouldn't read. Thank you.

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Photographs and Memories

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"…Nights we couldn't say goodbye,

And of all of the things that we knew,

Not a dream survived.

Photographs and memories,

All the love you gave to me…

Somehow, it just can't be true--

That's all I've left of you."

--"Photographs and Memories" by Jim Croce

It was gray, early morning when Hawkeye finally stirred. For hours he'd been sitting on the bed, rigid, his shoulders hunched defensively against the moonlight that slid through the window. Once or twice his head sunk toward his chest, but always he shook himself awake with half-realized terror.

It wasn't the dreams, although God knew that they were enough to keep anyone up. The new therapist, Albert, said that those were normal; he just had to ride them out and things would pick up in time. Normal. Normal was monsters under the bed and falling into an endless pit and turning up at school in a state of dishabille. Normal was not the thing that seized him by the throat when he drifted off, that roared in his ears, that left him soaked with sweat and screaming incoherently into the pillow until his father came down the hall and talked him out of it. He'd thought about looking Sidney up, of course, because Sidney _understood_, if that was even possible. But somehow he could never bring himself to do it. There was little use.

Tonight it wasn't the dreams that kept Hawkeye perched, quivering, at the foot of his bed. Tonight it was a number. 365. 365 days. The last time he'd encountered this date, it had been on the lips of an exuberant radio announcer. 365 days since Korea. Since --

It was nearly dawn. He stood suddenly, trembling, resolute. Two doors down, his father's breathing was smooth and serene. 

It had to be now.

He slid out into the hall and made his way to the staircase, avoiding the creaky boards with practiced ease. He scarcely felt his feet as he moved down the flight of steps. At the bottom, he leaned against the banister, his chest heaving. The walls drew in closer, immense and brooding, and his head whirled. Maybe this was a mistake. He clenched his teeth, reached out blindly, and lifted the telephone from its hook beside the stairs.

The operator's voice was in his ear in a moment, and he held onto the solidity of that until the darkness withdrew a little. He slid his free hand into his pocket and touched something there: a talisman to ward off the shadows that slithered in his peripheral vision, a thing that was comfortingly circumscribed and quadrilateral against his fingers. He closed his eyes, marking the skittering of fleeting nightmares in the space between seeing and not-seeing, and exhaled into the receiver.

"Hello?" prompted the operator. "How may I help you?"

Hawkeye paused a moment, then sat down on the bottom step, his knees bunched childishly against his chest. The clock chimed in the living room. 365.

"I… I need a number."

"Can you give me the city, sir?"

His eyes were still closed. He sucked in his cheeks, fingering the stiff square in his pocket. Finally, he took it out, put it face-up on the floor before him, and opened his eyes. Something leapt hard and pulse-like in his throat.

"Mill Valley, California."

"And the name?"

"Hunnicutt."

"Please hold, sir."

The line was suddenly quiet, and Hawkeye felt a familiar twinge of fear. He put his palm over the thing on the ground, cupping his fingers defensively; then he scooped it up and lifted it toward the light.

It was an old photograph, criss-crossed by indistinct white lines where it had been creased and re-creased. It showed a gray panorama of earth and sky, ash and smoke melting into smoke and ash across the line of the horizon, boundless but for the four rigid sides of the camera lens. In the background, jumbled together in oblique lines of jutting roofs and sagging walls, rose a cluster of buildings, lit from behind by the lusterless sun.

In the foreground, their grainy forms limned with a whitish glow that made them look almost pasted-on, stood two men. The taller one wore a pair of dark surgical scrubs and an exaggerated mustache that drooped over the edges of his wide grin. There was a clean, earnest cast to his face, an unabashed and unashamed humor about the mouth and eyes. Still, his jaw was set, and in his eyes there was a rigid and pained glint. His arm was extended, and --

Hawkeye paused there, his breath coming quick and arrhythmic. A few fervent curses left his lips and petered out into nothingness, and he leaned closer to the photo. There was undeniably a harshness in B.J.'s eyes -- and he had thought he had forgotten. He had thought he had forgotten the most heinous crime of the war, the insidious brutality that had gotten to them all, sooner or later, but that shouldn't have gotten to B.J. Shouldn't have forced him to turn to the wonders of their homemade gin to blur the clarity of their lives; shouldn't have whispered suspicions in his ear that he was alone and unnecessary and helpless and worlds away from a woman who was now learning to clean gutters by herself; shouldn't have made it necessary for him to grow that goofy mustache in order to support the illusion that he was still joking with the world; shouldn't have made his words sharper, his humor more cutting; above all, shouldn't have stripped him of his most basic human right, the right to cry, fully and fluidly, without the cheap aid of booze. Hawkeye nearly choked on his hate for the war, thinking of that and seeing those eyes, because it had taken B.J., the only goddamn good thing that might have come out of it.

In the photo, B.J.'s arm was draped over the shoulder of the other man. Hawkeye didn't have to study that man; much as he tried to avoid it, his own mirror showed the same person. He knew the haggard face, the lips lifted in a bemused and weary smile that didn't look quite sincere, the hair fading into gray above the ears, the chest receding as if to disappear between the ribs, the stooped posture, and the unavoidable eyes, glazed and hollow, the gaze inward, the lids heavy and flinching, the pupils dilated with the accretion of horror. He knew them, and yet he couldn't force himself to claim them.

He remembered that day. They'd had a steady stream of wounded for a while, and Hawkeye was still brooding over an internal bleeder who'd been taken up on the last bus to Seoul. At the end of his shift, B.J. quietly went over to a patient from earlier in the week, a young G.I. by the name of McGill, and haggled with him over the price of borrowing his Polaroid camera for an hour. Kellye, who was on duty that afternoon, later told Hawkeye that it was an epic battle: McGill was eager to make B.J. pay through the nose, but B.J. wouldn't leave him alone. McGill finally let it go for six dollars and one of B.J.'s less outrageous shirts. Then, out in the compound, B.J. got hold of Klinger, set him up behind a jeep with the camera, and lured Hawkeye out of post-op with the offer of a drink at Rosie's. Klinger obligingly snapped the picture just as they stepped out; there was still a squint in their eyes as they emerged into light from darkness. Somehow, that had made the whole day worthwhile, that unspoken assertion of B.J.'s that this moment was theirs alone.

"Sir?" said the operator, and Hawkeye started.

"Oh, yes?"

"I've got the number here."

"Ah," -- he fumbled with the photo -- "ah, just a minute." There was a pen beside the phone. Hawkeye snatched it up and turned the photograph over. "All right, shoot."

The operator read him the number, and Hawkeye copied it down in his loose scrawl on the white matted back of the Polaroid. Finishing, he sighed, letting his eyes drift over the neat, sterile inscription above the information he had just jotted down. It read:

_Hawk--_

Here's to better times and better photo opportunities.

You're not very photogenic. The guy beside you, though, he should be in pictures.

Have a nice war,

B.J.

He and B.J. had gotten their first close look at the picture in the Swamp before dinner. There, under the harsh glare of the lamps, with the cloying scent of anesthesia still clinging to his scrubs, B.J. painstakingly wrote his message. The care he took struck Hawkeye as being at odds with the flippancy of his words. Hawkeye had reflected, with a clenching in his stomach, that B.J.'s frankness about what was really on his mind would have to be listed as another casualty of the war.

"You got that, sir?" asked the operator.

"Yes," said Hawkeye, blinking slowly at the number. He couldn't read what he had written; his eyes suddenly ached profoundly.

His vision had been swimming that night, too. Later, at Rosie's, B.J. ordered them round after round of drinks. It didn't take long before Hawkeye was half-collapsed against B.J., both of them laughing breathlessly at some stupid pun.

The next set of drinks arrived, and B.J. made as if to pass one over. When Hawkeye tried to take it, he found B.J.'s fingers curving tentatively over his own. They locked gazes.

"Hawk," B.J. said unsteadily. His smile was blurry. "Hawk, you like the picture?"

Hawkeye, still chuckling, nodded vigorously and slipped B.J.'s fingers off of the stem of his glass.

"Of course."

B.J. relinquished his grip, but held Hawkeye's eyes. He reached down suddenly and caught Hawkeye's other hand.

"Good. I - I wanted a good pissure." He looked bemused. "Picture. You know?"

"Mmm," said Hawkeye distractedly, trying to free his fingers. B.J. clenched them harder, his smile fading slowly and resolving into strained tenderness. He leaned confidentially toward Hawkeye.

"I meant to kiss you," he said, his warm, alcohol-sweet breath vibrating against Hawkeye's cheek. "Really, I mean, just do it right there for the cam'ra."

Hawkeye looked at him, his skin shivering where it brushed B.J.'s stubble, and tried to keep his balance on the stool. B.J. paid him no mind. He didn't even seem to notice what a compromising position he was in, there in plain view of Rosie's clientele.

"It woulda been a better picture if I had," he said. "I just - 's just that, well, there was Klinger, an' right inna middle of the compound… I figured what we got had to be good enough."

Hawkeye pulled his hand away without a word. The alcohol was cold and bitter and inert in his stomach, and he blinked painfully in the bleary incandescence of the lamps. He lifted his drink and found B.J. still staring at him, distorted and wavering through the glass.

"To better photo opportunities," said Hawkeye, raising his glass higher and knowing in that moment that none of this time was theirs, no matter how many cheap snapshots they took of it. B.J. raised his glass as well, gulped its contents, and murmured for a refill. They sat in silence for the rest of the evening, dripping lust into their bourbons until the jukebox wound down and they were so drunk that they'd forgotten why they cared.

"All right," said the operator cheerily. "For a little extra charge, I can connect you, Mr. Pierce. "

"You can…" Hawkeye struggled to understand. "Oh. Oh. Connect me to - to - uh - " And he couldn't say it. He couldn't say B.J.'s name. He could think it -- hell, he'd been thinking it every day for the past year, a low, latent throb rising behind his ribs -- but something closed down inside when he tried to dredge all that up and commit it to the empty air. "Yes, I - " _I love him. I need to know he's across the phone line in the middle of the night, because somehow the only thing I remember of the war outside of the blood is him and me in the dark in the tent in a strange place in each other's arms._

He gripped the photograph until the edges dug into his palm, but all he could think of was another photograph that he'd seen a long time ago at the bottom of a dingy footlocker. He still couldn't think of Peg, couldn't hold her and B.J. and himself in his mind at the same time. But he had no trouble visualizing that yellowed picture of a beaming, pudgy infant, her smile somehow familiar as she submitted to a kiss on the forehead from another B.J., a B.J. with clean hands and clear eyes.

"That's my little girl," B.J. had said when he showed it to Hawkeye his first week in camp. It hadn't mattered so much then, but time went on inexorably, and things happened in the quiet dark. Hawkeye often found himself kneeling before the locker on the nights that Charles took the late shift, after B.J. had fallen against him, and there he would study the photograph. It was a part of B.J. that would never be his. He could never have a picture like that, not when every kiss was clandestine and every endearment muffled.

She was probably calling B.J. "Daddy" now. Hawkeye had no right to call him anything at all.

"Mr. Pierce? Would you like me to connect you?"

His jaw worked soundlessly for a moment. Then, his voice catching, he said, "No. No, actually, I think I… I think I made a mistake."

"Sorry?"

"No, _I'm_ sorry. For wasting your time. Just, uh… send me the bill."

The operator began to speak again, but Hawkeye, shaking, placed the receiver back on the hook. His vision blurred, but he picked up the pen and fiercely scratched out the number on the photograph until it was illegible.

"Wrong number," he whispered raggedly, swaying against the banister. "Wrong goddamn number altogether."


End file.
